Android Honeycomb

It appears that we've now got not only the place (or one of the places, you never know,) where the Motorola XOOM tablet will be released, we've got the expected shipping time too! Before you get any further, check out all the most info on the XOOM, paying special close attention to the stories about the XOOM being a Carphone Warehouse exclusive in the UK, and the XOOM silver Euro Edition hands-on we picked up whilst in Barcelona this past week at Mobile World Congress.

We're at Mobile World Congress 2011 at the Motorola presentation and we've been given a very basic rundown of some of the features you'll see with the out-of-box build of Motorola XOOM's user interface. This tablet is of course the one Google worked most closely with as far as Android 3.0 Honeycomb goes, so what you see will for the most part be the most pure version of everything Honeycomb has to offer. NOTE: the tablet this presenter is showing us has clearly been on display for a couple of days, as the screens are filled with videos, widgets, and a ton of instances of the same Honeycomb clock. Very messy!

There are so many Honeycomb driven tablets coming out at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, that it's almost becoming ho-hum. But SlashGear came across the LG Optimus Pad and found it surprisingly refreshing. But with it's glossy LED screen, that may not last long.

Here at Android Community, and indeed at the R3 network as a whole, we really love a good concept here and there, especially when that concept is a bit of industrial design along the lines of a smartphone. We like it DOUBLY when we find out it's an Android phone, just like that's happened here with the HTC Forest, a concept phone by Long-Nong Huang. Before we go any further - can you guess its prospective specs?

Our pals over at TBreak have got their hands on a brand spanking new model of the Motorola XOOM, the tablet all Android superfans are flipping their lids over because it's been made in close collaboration with Google's Android team to optimize it as much as possible for the also brand new Android 3.0 Honeycomb mobile operating system. TBreak team member Abbas Jaffar Ali (the guy doing the video) also mentions that he asked one of the Motorola reps if they had a 7" XOOM tablet in the works to which they replied "no comment."

Oh joyous day! Mobile World Congress 2011 is just around the corner and the rumor barrels have gotten to the breaking point - leaks everywhere! A source speaking with PocketLint has confirmed that not only will Samsung be releasing a new tablet this Sunday (two days away!), they'll be releasing a 10.1-inch tablet packing no less than Android 3.0 Honeycomb!

The reviews are in, and it appears that LG, T-Mobile, and Optimus Prime have some talking to do. The following commercial is one that's been released in the past 24 hours by LG then quickly taken back down again, presumably because everyone in the world hates is so much. The ad spot shows the G-Slate, aka the LG Optimus Pad, transforming into the leader of the Go-Bots, Optimus Prime. This robot then gets his punch on with a Megatron of sorts, this evil robot turning out to be an embodiment of the Apple brand, (and we assume, the iPad.)

The following is a nutshelled rundown of what Renderscript is, and what it does. Renderscript is a brand new feature that was introduced, but not fully explained during the official Android 3.0 Honeycomb event. What Renderscript is involved in is graphics. Renderscript is a new API that'll deal with high-performance 3D rendering as well as compute operations. What Renderscript aims to do is to bring a higher performance, lower level API to developers who, in a blaze of glory, want to max out the performance of their applications. These developers must be comfortable working "close to the metal" if they're going to use this new API, but in doing so, they'll receive three tools: a developer friendly compute API similar to CUDA, a simple API for rendering 3D on top of hardware acceleration, and a familiar language for use in C99.

If you're a fan of Angry Birds, and you know we are when we're not feeling cynical, you're pretty pumped up about the oncoming expansion to be released on Valentine's Day. Very little has been known about this project, which up until this moment has been called "Pink." What we know now, thanks to out best buddy Ina Fried, is that this Angry Birds expansion is called "Hogs and Kisses," comes in HD for iPad (and hopefully something similar for Honeycomb,) as well as its standard Android and iPhone/iPod Touch versions, and apparently it'll be out sooner than expected - next week soon!

Well would you look at that. A Best Buy in Grand Rapids, Michigan seems to have revealed to the world the release dates of both the Motorola XOOM Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablet AND the HTC ThunderBolt. The XOOM will be released on February 24th, while the ThunderBolt will be out on the 14th of February. Sounds like we've got a full and joyous month ahead of us. Not that we wouldn't have already had a full an joyous month what with Mobile World Congress on the horizon, but heck, here's the juicy bits right back in the states!